Political commentary

Shirley as Zen Buddhist

Ferdinand Mount

There's quite a lot of kissing going on in the corner by the doors where new members lurk before taking their seats. Bob Mitchell, the Social Democrat MP from Southampton, kisses Shirley Williams. So, greatly daring, does Jack Ashley, one of her former Labour colleagues. A Tory backbencher lunges forward hopefully, but she has turned away to talk to Another. And here comes Stephen Ross, Liberal MP for the Isle of Wight, to buss her lightly on the ear.

There is no hint of Eros about these encounters. They are more like one of those Californian therapy sessions in which the magnetic group leader in jeans and sneakers instructs you to hug and kiss your neighbour and 'say exactly how you feel now'. Even the cheers and waving of order papers from the two rows of Liberal and Social-Democratic MPs as she stumps down the aisle to take the oath, flanked by Dr Owen and Mr Rodgers, seem more like the compulsory silly game which the patients are told to play to break the ice.

All the same, what Mrs Williams feels is good. She has expunged the memory of her humiliating defeat at the general election. She has flattened the Labour Party and terrified the Tories. Even if she did little better than the prevailing swing to the Alliance, she is still the first major political figure to win a spectacular by-election in recent times. Here, as in so much else, the SDP is a throwback to the old days before the domination of politics by party machines. And, though this is not the kind of thing one likes to discuss, she has got in before Roy.

Mrs Williams seems to have been on a permanent high ever since she went to Crosby. She is simultaneously serene and hyperactive. She bustles about with a fixed seraphic smile. To the unenlightened, her replies often sound senseless. The novice who asks her where she stands is told, 'I am a hundred yards ahead of the spectrum and running.' Is she for or against incomes policy? The novice is told not to bother her with such foolish detailed questions: 'we are breaking the mould.' Novice is bewildered. Yet he cannot help noticing that she retains a practical instinct for selfpreservation. Without any apparent effort, she skirts open manholes and hops over banana skins.

This trance-like mixture of evasiveness and practicality is familiar to students of the mystical religions of the East. In Zen Buddhism, the novice asks the Master questions like: 'what is Truth, 0 Master?' — to which the irritating old buzzard replies: `go and wash your face.'

Social Democratic policy both Is and Not-Is. On the other hand, the Four Masters of Zen Democracy indubitably want to Be. For Being, not Doing, is the Way. Is a politician without a majority really a politician? Can you sit down without a chair?

But conceal it cleverly though they do, the SDP's drift does eventually and unmistakably emerge. Behind the artificial argument about whether the Social Democrats should be a 'radical' party or a 'moderate' party, an almost oriental acceptance of the World-as-it-is may be discerned.

'End seesaw politics' is the slogan which, above all, unites the Social Democrats and the Liberals. If you immobilise a seesaw, what you have is an inert plank.

A Labour government would repeal everything. A Social Democratic government would repeal nothing. Neither its Ministers nor its supporters would be anxious to undo any tolerably popular reform introduced by its predecessors. That is the virtue of populism.

For the first time since the war, one of the most disabling pressures upon British government is removed. No longer do Ministers have to worry about what their successors would do. For there is no point in slanting policy in the vain hope of gaining the tacit consent of a Footish or Bennite Labour government. And there is no need to worry about what Mr Jenkins or Mrs Williams would do in office. If it works, they would let it go on running.

As a result, almost unconsciously, Tory Ministers have developed a split reaction towards the rise of the Social Democrats. On the one hand, it is a terrifying threat to political survival. Could it be the Conservative Party, and not the Labour Party, which is wiped out? Why is it that those ghastly projections of disaster show the Tories reduced to one or four seats while Labour still clings on to 70 or 100?

Yet along with the political panic goes a kind of governmental liberation. A couple of years ago, it would have been unthinkable that a highly unpopular Conservative government would at this late-ish stage in a Parliament begin even to consider ways of altering the universal character of the National Health Service. Hitherto, the encouragement of private health insurance has been regarded as electoral suicide. You can chart the alteration in public feeling by the rate at which the SDP's commitment to the state ownership and provision of goods and services has become diluted and quali fled.

The Social Democrats never stop talking about co-operatives. Now a co-operative is an admirable enterprise. But in political discourse, particularly during the conversion from socialism to anti-socialism, it amounts to an undemanding, genteel way of advocating de-nationalisation. Co-ops and management 'buyouts' share with joint stock company the essential features of all free enterprises: independence of politics and government plus dependence upon satisfying the customer.

To tie yourself to the existing shape of the Welfare State is to commit yourself to an ever-increasing programme of compulsion. As Mr Arthur Seldon points out, it is no longer enough for the collectivist to hope that BUPA and the independent schools will wither away; he must forcibly repress their growth.

But a more pressing imperative than public taste is redrawing the limits of whit is politically impossible. Without tapping private sources, no government can now raise enough revenue out of taxation to meet the demands of the State sector.

We have to recognise the uniqueness of the Attlee legacy. Outside the Communist world — where State control of production is matched by State control of wages — only Britain has health and education services which are 95 per cent State-controlled and funded as well as virtual State monopolies in fuel, power and public transport. Denationalising or privatising is no longer a doctrinal caprice, a theoretical question of liberty and the dispersion of power. It is a practical question, viz, how to raise the cash. The public authorities and corporations — water, steel, coal, railways — now eat up money so fast that, for the first time, it seems more troublesome to leave them as they are than to split them up, farm them out, sell them off or turn them into co-ops.

That is the true significance of the speed and relative good humour with which the Cabinet has settled its differences over public spending. The new-found harmony between Left and Right does not rest upon any lasting reconciliation. It is merely an unspoken recognition that in a highly socialised economy like Britain's, you cannot make substantial cuts in public spending without cutting the functions of the State.

The Prime Minister is both free and notfree. She cannot reflate or deflate significantly; as far as general economic management goes, she can only hang on and hope. But as far as redrawing the limits of government goes, at this moment she enjoys more political freedom to follow her inclinations than any Prime Minister since Lord Attlee. And in that freedom, whether she likes it or not, Mrs Williams is her unwitting ally.